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Disaster Management: When Not to Send a Press Release
A lot of my clients are doing a one-off piece of public relations because they need news done quickly. People generally come to to you with urgent press release needs when something has gone horribly awry; I do a fair bit of disaster management here at OvernightPR. I’m good at that kind of PR, and though it may sound like I’m shooting myself in the foot when I say this–given that I specialize in press releases written quickly–your best bet isn’t always to address your disaster with a press release. Let’s look at when a press release is a good way to get the news out and manage your problem:
- Legal Issues
- Legal issues–especially investor-related legal issues–generally have specific requirements for what you can talk about, when you should discuss it, and how you need to distribute the news. If your lawyer advises you send a press release, don’t quibble.
- Corrections
- If you made a mistake in a previous public statement, it’s probably best to issue the correction in the same manner. No one likes eating ‘umble pie, but own up to the mistake and try to move on, and you’ll be better off than if you let the impression that you’re dishonest fester in your audience’s minds.
- Urgent news
- If your disaster is a real-life honest to goodness breaking news disaster of the “we need to recall our product before it kills someone” sort, alternative measures of PR may not be the solution you need. The wire services work hard to get your news out to journalists as quickly and accurately as they can, so you might as well make use of that skill set and stick by the traditional method.
Those are the three big areas of disaster where you definitely want to make sure that you’ve put a lot of thought into your decision before ruling out a press release as your method of communication. So when is it more appropriate to look at alternative measures?
- Community Management
- There are times when you’ve done nothing illegal and you don’t have immediately pressing lifesaving news. Maybe you’ve made a mistake less in the “we issued a factually incorrect statement” way and more in the “we screwed up” fashion. Press releases are a very impersonal tool to try and repair a relationship with your community. Look at a more direct means of communicating, then. One example I may talk about in a later post is using an open letter to repair community relations.
- Customer Service
- This is related to “Community Management”, but with a key difference. One of the nightmares that social media has brought to the average executive in a company is that social media means that if one of your customer-facing employees is having a bad day, you can quickly find yourself having a social media-driven PR nightmare. An example of this is the recent Ocean Marketing meltdown that more or less illustrated the perfect storm of “employee having a bad day” and “social media PR disaster” I’m talking about here. This wasn’t an example of a mistake made at the corporate decision-making level, and issuing a press release (which N-Control, the company represented by Ocean Marketing, did end up doing) isn’t going to fix the problem. When you’re trying to correct a customer-centered issue, take a customer-centered approach and talk to them in the same arena that they’re already in.
- When Another Company is Involved
- Disaster management PR is tricky enough when one company is involved; when you have two or more, it gets even trickier. In that respect, whether you’re dealing with a public disappointment over an announced contract that fell through or you’re trying to put some spin on the fact that one of your big clients just elected to not renew a long-running contract with you, using channels other than press releases can help you maintain some control of the story without escalating the issue into a press release war. Those may be kind of fun to watch from the outside, but they look anything but professional.
At a macro level, it comes to this: public-facing disaster PR is frequently handled best via methods other than press releases. When you have other outside issues influencing your method of discussion, though, you would be ill-advised to ignore them.
Social Media “Marketing” is Just PR in a Snazzy Suit
There’s a simple truth to the social media marketing world that people don’t talk about: the term social media “marketing” is something of a lie. More precisely, while there are scammers and spammers aplenty, if you’re using social media as a means to bring in revenue by establishing a dialog between your brand and those who are interested in your product or services, you can’t really call what you’re doing social media “marketing.”
It sounds an awful lot like social media PR to me.
It’s something I have to get off my chest. I run a social media marketing firm, sure. But many of the skills that I use, either in advising clients or in using the various channels, reads like what you should do when you’re being a responsible public relations representative who’s reaching out to a journalist to pitch a story. Everyone’s a potential source of a sudden massive Twitter revolt, so you need to treat everyone you encounter online as if they had the potential to direct the attention of a hundred thousand potential clients at your brand. With that thought in mind, here’s a quick primer on how to convert those traditional PR skills into social media marketing ones.
Lose the Flab From Your Social Media Regimen
- Image by Getty Images via Daylife
Since the holidays, I’ve been on the South Beach diet to lose some of those 20 extra pounds that magically appeared on my midsection this year (wonder how that happened!). That’s inspired me to start providing my social media clients with a lean, mean regimen for their social media program. It’s worked for them, and you can use it, too. While this is a post that’s more appropriate on my social media business blog (where it will get to eventually), it’s valuable PR strategy, too. It is lean, mean, and anyone can do it to get more out of their social media efforts.
Here’s your new social media workout plan:
- Hit up your social media services 3x a day for about 10 minutes each time. Identify which services are most effective for you and use those more often. I generally say 10 minutes before work, 10 at lunch, and 10 minutes after the day is done.
- If you’re using an analytics program like Google Analytics, use your natural search queries to tell you what phrases people are finding you for. Are those phrases you want to be found for? Then use them in your social media. Is your audience coming from keywords that don’t convert? Use better keywords in your social media.
- If you aren’t measuring analytics, go to Google.com/analytics and do so.
- Basic morning routine for Twitter:
- Identify two or three twitter personalities that always have something interesting to say. Each morning, retweet something they’ve posted.
- Find a blog or two that writes in your space. Tweet links to the interesting articles that they’ve written
- Write a blog yourself? Make sure that you put your content in your tweets.
- Look over your replies and DM’s and answer all appropriately
- Finally, using a client like TweetDeck or Seesmic Desktop, set up searches for words or phrases that are pertinent to what you do. Reply to other twitter posters who post using those terms.
- This should take 10 – 15 minutes every day, once you get it to a system.
- Basic afternoon routine for Facebook;
- Check out your wall. Have you gotten new fans? Welcome them with a quick message.
- Have you had any kind of event recently? Post pictures / video / whatever on it.
- Run Facebook searches for terms that are pertinent to your organization. Have your fan page become a fan of other organizations that have similar interests.
- Look over your wall for comments and reply; empty out inbox and reply as well
- Post 2 -3 links to interesting information that is related to your organization
- This takes 10 – 15 minutes when it’s done
- LinkedIn Evening routine
- Look for questions on the groups that you belong to. Answer two that you can legitimately offer an interesting and informed opinion on.
- Been to a networking event? Run searches on people who’s cards you have. Find them on LinkedIn and follow ‘em.
- Has anyone in your network changed job positions or posted another important status update? Drop ‘em a note commenting on it.
- This is 5 – 10 minutes of work.
- Blogging / Internet Evening routine
- Set up Google Alerts on keywords that are pertinent to your interests. Get emails daily and check the links that Google sends you out. Generally, I recommend an alert on your brand, on your market, and on yourself as well. Read the alerts for links / ideas for the other social media outlets and click through on the interesting ones.
- Leave comments on any blog post that you actually read. Yes, every single one. They have to have something interesting to say, but don’t need to be Shakespeare.
- This takes 10 minutes or so.
There’s your daily workout. Stick to it for 3 months and come back for a checkup.
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OvernightPR’s First Article on CommunityMX
A friend of mine has written articles for Community MX for a while now, and he mentioned to me that they’ve been looking for content writers. I’m contributing to the site, now, and they have posted my first article there. It’s part 1 of a two part series about optimizing their pre-built site templates to make them more search friendly. Here’s a quick excerpt:
This two part article series discusses some of the basics of structuring a web site to help with Search Optimization, and then applies these optimization tactics to two different CommunityMX JumpStarts, Siberia and Stelvio Pass.
This is Part 1 of 2, and discusses the theory of search optimization, keyword research, buying a domain, and structuring a web site. Part 2 brings this theory and prep work into practice using some of Community MX’s excellent JumpStart templates. We’ll be including and editing little snippets of these JumpStarts in this article, but you’ll be best served if you download both of the JumpStarts now.
Take a moment and check it out. CommunityMX has a lot of resources, the membership’s pretty low cost, and, well, I’m not above driving traffic to the site to show them that my articles are worthwhile. 
Follow-Up Tip: How to write a follow-up email
Image Credit: Follow The Leader by KaCey97007. Licensed through Creative Commons on flickr.com
If you’ve read my previous articles (How to Follow-Up in particular), you’ve seen the OvernightPR way to follow up on your press release. I’ve said this before a few times, but I’ll mention it here again: your press release is a tool for you to use to get PR coverage, not and end-goal of your PR efforts. In order to maximize your return on the investment of writing a release (or paying a writer to do it for you) and distributing it, you need to have your all your ducks in a row.
I’ve given dozens of tips away on how to line those little guys up to make sure that you don’t miss your opportunity with your press release, but I’ve also received a few requests from readers of past articles asking how exactly they should phrase their follow-up email. That’s largely a matter of personal taste, but I’ll share with you my template that I use when I’m doing follow-up emails.
Make the Most of Your Release: Be the Source
If you’ve read any of my articles, you know that I’m fond of lists. On the heels of my last article about how to follow up on your release (See “Trevor’s 7 Rules of PR Pitching”), here’s the seventh of 6 tips to help you get the most out of your follow-up (read the first here).
Start Your Own: You know who some of the most powerful authorities in most market spaces are? The guys who write about it.
Journalist Stand on flickr by Glass Window licensed through Creative Commons 2.0
You know that post I put up earlier today? The previous one? Where I said that “reaching out” was the best way to get your story told. I lied a little bit.
Well, pretty much completely, actually. The absolute best way to get your story told is to be the source that tells that story. This is a lot of work, and don’t let anyone else tell you otherwise. Providing quality content that gets shared and talked about is brutally hard. Talk to anyone who’s a leading blogger and they’ll tell you that it is a lot of work to become a market leader in information about a big topic.
But that’s not what you need to become. Don’t look to be the biggest blogger on marketing and public relations. Be the guy who tells everyone how to make the most of a press release, a little budget, and a few hours of precious time out of the day. (Actually, um, don’t. That’s what I”m going for.) Don’t be the leading resource on machinery, just the ‘Net’s best blog on automated printing and folding machines. Is that sexy? Not really. but it’s what will bring in business, if your company makes those folding and printing machines.
So start your own blog. Nurture it. Feed it for two or three or five years. Once you get in the habit of writing about your market space, informing others about the new trends, and generally becoming a resource for anyone who wants to know about your market, you’ll look around one day and realize that every post you write gets linked to by 40 guys and discussed in depth by another 10. You’ve become a mover and a shaker, somehow, when you weren’t looking, and now you find that the reporters come to you.
Is this an easy way to get your story told? Well, no. But if there’s no one else out there who writes in quite the right area that your business works in, it’s definitely one of the most effective.
Make the Most of Your Release: Reach Out
If you’ve read any of my articles, you know that I’m fond of lists. On the heels of my last article about how to follow up on your release (See “Trevor’s 7 Rules of PR Pitching”), here’s the fifth of 6 tips to help you get the most out of your follow-up (read the first here).
Reach Out: Send out good tips about items in your field that don’t relate to you to influential media.
Image Credit: Tippie Toes by Exquisitur licensed through Creative Commons
Sound counter-intuitive? Maybe a little. But it pays off, even if it does mean that the press runs a story that talks about a competitor or mentions a burgeoning trend without discussing you. How’s it pay off? In two ways:
- Journalists are human, too: Make their job a little easier and they’ll remember you fondly. This means that you’ll have an easier time reaching them the next time that you want to get your own story covered, that they’ll be prone to call you for quotes when they need someone to weigh in on something they’re writing, and that they’ll feel (ever so slightly) like they owe you a good turn for the favor that you did them.
- You’re keeping up with the trends: As I’ve covered earlier, there’s a number of ways that knowing what’s happening in your business pays off well for your ability to write news releases (and it’s a no-brainer from a general business perspective). It’s also something that you can legitimately budget a little time to each week as part of your media outreach and not feel like you’re a slacker for tooling around reading blogs or your RSS feed reader for two hours.
Make the Most of Your Release: Provide Supporting Content
If you’ve read any of my articles, you know that I’m fond of lists. On the heels of my last article about how to follow up on your release (See “Trevor’s 7 Rules of PR Pitching”), here’s the fourth of 6 tips to help you get the most out of your follow-up (read the first here).
Provide Supporting Content: Post your release, photos, videos, diagrams, and anything else that you can think a reporter might possibly want on your website where it’s easy to get.
Image Credit: Didn't Shrug by Bitterjug licensed via Creative Commons 2.0
Yes, post a copy of the release on your website. But that’s the beginning. You also want photos, videos, company founder bios, product demonstrations, testimonials, and anything else that you can imagine a reporter could ever want from your company. Put it where it’s easy to get. A reporter on a 30 minute deadline isn’t going to email you for a quote, she’ll just find another source. You want it as easy as possible for a reporter who’s come to your website from your release to find the answers to any questions that she wants quickly and easily.
Make The Most of Your Release: Keep Current
If you’ve read any of my articles, you know that I’m fond of lists. On the heels of my last article about how to follow up on your release (See “Trevor’s 7 Rules of PR Pitching”), here’s the third of 6 tips to help you get the most out of your follow-up (read the first here).
Keep Current: Make sure before you send out a release that you’ve been reading who’s been writing about similar topics recently.
Image Credit: Run Stella Run by Laertes licensed by Creative Commons 2.0
Before you write that release (or before you talk to your writer about it) look at the twitter streams and RSS feeds of your media people. What are they talking about right now? Figure out how your story applies to the current news. Sometimes this is easy. Everyone’s talking about an expo or event, and you’re going to be there. Your headline just about writes itself, then: “ACME Inc. to showcase new widget at WIDGETCON Convention in San Diego.” Sometimes this is more of a stretch. Everyone’s talking about an expo or event in your industry, and you want to announce that you’ve just introduced a new product. “ACME Inc. debuts new widget that compares with/contrasts with/supersedes WIDGETCON theme,” for example.